Arts Plus. Cannes Film Festival.

`Buzz' Speaks Volumes About Cannes' Attitude

French Movie `Red' Leads In Early Betting For Best

That's the big question being asked under beach club umbrellas and on palm-shaded hotel terraces as the 47th Cannes International Film Festival reels into its final weekend.

All the chatter, or so-called buzz, about who might snag top palm frond laurels at Monday's awards ceremony is a heady blend of gossip and speculation-and just as dangerous.

A little bit of buzz is a good thing: It gets people interested in a film. Too much buzz, even good buzz, can be bad: Unrealistic expectations may be raised, only to be dashed with disastrous consequences.

But bad buzz can be deadlier than no buzz at all: Fair or unfair, negative news spreads faster than crabgrass and is harder to eradicate.

"It's real," says Russell Schwartz, president of Gramercy Pictures, when asked about the buzz factor.

"The question is: How long will it last and will it resonate?"

Although there are still six more films to be screened in the main competition, including the much-awaited American megastar production, "Pulp Fiction," here's the gist of the buzz on films and performances so far:

- For best film in the main competition, the current heavy favorite is "Red," the third in the French tricolor trilogy by director Krzystof Kieslowski. A stylishly edgy, psychological-thriller-love-story, easy to understand in any language, the film stars young actress Irene Jacob and veteran Jean-Louis Trintignant, best-known to American audiences as the heartthrob race driver in "A Man and a Woman." "Dead Tired," French director Michel Blanc's spoof on the nature of movie star celebrity, starring Chanel model Carole Bouquet, is another hot possibility, along with the Chinese film, "To Live."

- Trintignant also is favored in the best-actor category, along with Albert Finney, who reduced audiences here to tears as the anguished prep school teacher taking stock of his life in British director Mike Figgis' "The Browning Version."

- Best-actress betting is strong on Jennifer Jason Leigh, who stars in two competing American films, Joel and Ethan Coen's "The Hudsucker Proxy" and Alan Rudolph's "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle," in which she gives an arresting portrayal of New Yorker writer and Algonquin Round Table regular Dorothy Parker. "To Live" star Gong Liis another comer.

- In the festival's subsidiary competition, American Darnell Martin's "I Like It Like That," the first film to be presented here by a black female director, is highly regarded, as is the Australian drag queen epic, "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert."

- As the festival heads for the finish line, numerous press agents have talked themselves into laryngitis. And, as illustrated in this conversational snippet overheard at the Carlton Hotel, at least one young publicist is having nightmares.

"I had a dream last night that I had to pick up Michelle Pfeiffer at the Venice airport-which I did one time-but I didn't know how I was going to do it because I was in Nice and the plane was arriving at 4 o'clock in the morning and I couldn't get to Venice in time.

"Then I woke up and realized I was here, she wasn't coming there and nobody had to go to Venice."